Travelling from Slovakia to Ukraine. The destination point is Chernobyl Zone. How it was. Tour to Chernobyl and Pripyat on exclusive cars. "ZastavaklubSlovenije"

Imagine that you go through life, like most people do - you wake up in the morning and go to work, return home after 8 or 12 hours, do some household chores, and then spend the rest of the day with family and friends. You are trying to get the most out of a sunny weekend. You get an average salary and regular benefits. You go on vacation once or twice a year, where you forget about your little problems. You live in a modern city that offers you everything you need and that is filled with things you don't need. Life is Beautiful...

But once, in the blink of an eye, all your assets and all your friends disappear. At first you don’t even realize it. Soldiers in special protective clothing and gas masks flood the streets and spray some kind of cleaning products everywhere. Two days later, an announcement is circulating that a temporary evacuation of the city is planned due to an incident at a local power station. You take with you only everything you need, and leave the rest. Cooked food for your pet, left a message at the door and go to the bus, where you sit quietly, because you do not quite understand what is happening at all and what it will bring to your future.

The events that occurred after the explosion in the first hours of April 26, 1986 at the 4th reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, marked the beginning of a deadly war against the invisible criminal. This event, known as the worst nuclear disaster in history, whose images are repeated in the most terrible horror films. These two facts immediately came to my mind when on the night of our club meeting a friend suggested a trip to the exclusion zone.

Alerts immediately appear in my head warning that this is likely to be the last thing I will ever do. That evening, we did not come to any conclusion, except that our friend was a little crazy, but the idea remained in my head. A lot of time has passed with a lot of research. Before that, we came to the conclusion that we just need to go along this path. Visiting the zone is considered safe. The fact that our body receives more radiation from cosmic rays during an air flight than in one day in Chernobyl provided me with a shipment. Preparations began, and there was a lot of work. Our choice of transport? Home quality! ThreeFlags 101 Mediterranean, built between 1979 and 1981. Cars that have already established themselves as reliable and convenient cars for everyday use and long trips. 33 years later and one day after the disaster, under a picturesque sunrise, a trio from the Mediterranean lined up in Ljubljana and headed to the hotel at a distance of about 850 kilometers.

We crossed Slovenia quickly. We went to Hungary and a long track appeared in front of us. I admit, a bit of nervousness swept me because this trip was mainly a test drive of the new integrated gearbox, which is faster than the old one, but, as time has shown, this nervousness was unnecessary. Everything went according to plan.

The Ukrainian border was a completely different experience than the previous one. I don’t remember seeing the AK-47 outside the museum. There are several checkpoints on the border, and armed soldiers are plentiful. It didn't take us long to figure out how to get a smile from these dark faces. All very interestingly control the border.

Here we have already reached the city of Uzhgorod and found our hotel for the night. The architecture of the city was a reminder that this country was once part of a powerful alliance of countries. The whole next day we spent in cars, breaking kilometer by kilometer, mainly in the conditions of heavy rains. During the day we found ourselves in a small village with few road signs and very poor roads. We are stuck! But in the end, it turned out to be a pleasant experience, because a local gas station employee greeted us with delicious home-cooked dishes. There was a conversation about the former state of Yugoslavia and how this person once spent his days there working as a truck driver. Interestingly, a little act of kindness can make a day better for someone. We found the main road and continued on to our hotel in Kiev, where we arrived late in the evening. A day of restoration followed, followed by a meeting of the city and a tasting of local delicacies. But what we were looking forward to was our journey about 100 km, north of the capital and to the border with Belarus.

The weather was, as planned, that day - gray and rainy, but it did not bother us, we rode regardless of the weather situation. Excursions in the exclusion zone cannot be unaccompanied, so in the morning in front of the hotel we met our guide from the travel agency Go2Chernobyl. We started our cars and began to leave the city, where visible exhaust fumes accompanied us some part of the road. The more we moved away from the city and the closer we were to our destination, the less traffic jams and more and more pits on the road. After an hour's drive, the scene we're finally waiting for